1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a portable terminal, and in particular, to a method and system for providing an electronic mail (E-mail) service to users through portable terminals having a wireless Internet access function.
2. Description of the Related Art
The rising demand for multimedia services increases interest in an E-mail service via a PC (personal Computer) in diverse forms such as a music mail, a picture card, an animation mail, and the like.
Meanwhile, portable terminals like PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), smart phones, and mobile phones do no more than provide text information due to limitations in the data rate of a network and the performance of the processors, memories, and LCDs (Liquid Crystal Displays) of the terminals. Yet, with the advent of future mobile communication networks like CDMA 2000 (Code Division Multiple Access 2000), high rate data transmission is enabled and thus terminals supporting moving pictures can provide multimedia data transmission/reception.
One of the techniques of exchanging multimedia information between portable terminals is to automatically connect them to a predetermined server over the Internet wirelessly upon receipt of a periodical message or a particular message and download multimedia information. This technique is implemented by adapting such an application service as for a PC to a portable terminal. Therefore, the portable terminal needs a local memory for storing received multimedia data. A multimedia data file is usually several megabytes in length. To store this multimedia data file, a large capacity local memory is required, which a typical moving-picture terminal cannot afford. In addition, a multimedia transmission/reception service is needed aside from the general E-mail service.